Over the years, ad targeting campaigns have continuously improved to better align with individual interests and optimize advertiser ROI. This progress has been made possible thanks to navigation data, which help understand consumers and their purchase intentions, but raise controversies regarding personal data privacy. The announced removal of third-party cookies by Google in 2022 on its Chrome browser has sparked many questions and concerns among advertisers.
Are we witnessing a step backwards, returning to advertising without real targeting capabilities? What impact will this removal have on campaign performance? How to prepare for these changes? This article aims to provide viable answers that digital marketing professionals have been exploring for months.
Targeting: from individual to collective
One of the main changes brought by the removal of third-party cookies concerns the way campaigns are targeted.
Today, targeting approaches focus on the individual, considering socio-demographic attributes (gender, age, location, socio-professional category…) and interests deduced from browsing behavior. Thus, advertisers can propose their products and services to internet users likely to be interested in their offer: a children’s clothing brand can target a parent audience for acquisition, and retarget users who visited its site to boost conversion.
What will happen with the removal of cookies? Rest assured, alternative technologies are ready to take over to help advertisers maintain the relevance of their ads, while preserving users’ privacy.
For several months now, interest-based advertising by cohorts (FLoC, Federated Learning of Cohorts) seems promising. Early results of this approach, which protects the user by masking them “within a group” and uses local storage to keep private browsing history, have shown results very close to cookie-based targeting. Once third-party cookies are fully removed, this system will be tested on a larger scale and optimized.
Cookies are dead… long live cookies!
What about other uses? Good news for advertisers: the end of third-party cookies does not mean the end of all cookies or all tracking technologies. First-party cookies, which allow brands and media to collect data from their own users (declarative, navigation, purchase data, etc.) remain a real added value for their activity.
If soon a brand will no longer be able to rely on third-party data, it will be in its interest to invest in its own data by enriching its customer knowledge and user base. Implementing collection operations, in-store or online, is one way to prepare for this shift.
Finally, another challenge brought by the blocking of third-party cookies is measuring campaign performance, especially attributing conversions among different activated levers. For this, implementing first-party or Server to Server (S2S) tags, not affected by removal measures, is one of the ways to ensure the relay of third-party cookies. This transition has likely already started several months ago for advertisers supported by agencies, as third-party cookies have already disappeared from Mozilla and Apple browsers.
The online advertising sector is preparing for a major change. Despite concerns it may have raised, alternative solutions are already underway or in testing, allowing advertisers to go through these changes smoothly and with better protection of personal data.
Photo credits: freepik
